The first benchmark we will be using today is SiSoft SANDRA, one of the most popular synthetic benchmarking programs. In the cpu arithmetic test, the Gigabyte KT600 motherboard has a minimal speed improvement over the Soyo KT600 Platinum. Too close to call a winner while taking the margin of error into account.

Moving on to the SANDRA cpu multimedia test, the Soyo KT600 Platinum is a tad slower than the Gigabyte motherboard with integer calculations, but it does nudge ahead in the floating point test.

In the SiSoft SANDRA memory bandwidth tests, the two KT600 motherboards are still neck and neck, but the Soyo KT600 Platinum is once again falling behind to the Gigabyte KT600 solution by a small margin.

..:: MBReview PriBench v1.04 ::..

Using our very own in-house benchmark, MBReview PriBench uses a computationally intensive algorithm to compute several hundred millions of prime integers. Unlike other synthetic benchmarks which relies on additional aspects within a computer system like hard drive speeds, PriBench does not rely on any of these exterior devices for the tests. PriBench is a system level benchmark, and solely utilizes the performance of the processor and memory subsystem. Our benchmarking program is extremely accurate as we have witnessed time fluctuations of approximately .03 seconds. Taking a look at the results, our statement proves itself worthy in the different intensity tests due to the fact that the Gigabyte motherboard clocks the FSB of our AMD processor a half megahertz faster than the Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum.

..:: SuperPI ::..

In the Super PI tests, we run the program four times; once at one million, once at two million, once at four million, and once at eight million. The numbers in the graph above show the time in seconds that it took the system to calculate prime integers to the set number of digits with the lower score in each test indicating better performance. In this benchmark, the speed differences between the two KT600 motherboards is once again almost non-existent. But I would like to point out that the Soyo KT600 Platinum always did have a rough time with the four million prime integer test. This was the first benchmark test that the KT600 Platinum could not complete using the beta BIOS update that Soyo sent to us for testing.

..:: Specviewperf 7.0 ::..

After we analyzed our data from the processor intensive benchmark tests, I was hoping that the Soyo KT600 Platinum would finally start to pull ahead of the competition in the graphic benchmark tests, but to my dismay, it did not. After taking a look at the SPECviewperf test results, the winner again is the Gigabyte KT600 motherboard, but again it is by a slight margin.

..:: FutureMark 3DMark2001SE ::..

More of the same results in the 3DMark2001 SE benchmark. The Gigabyte motherboard is still able to nudge ahead of the KT600 Platinum, over 100 points more in the 640x480x16 test as a matter of fact

..:: Quake III Arena ::..

The next benchmark we have for you is embedded within my favorite computer game, Quake III Arena. There is no question that the relevance of this benchmark is coming to an end soon, however overall performance can improve dramatically with increased system memory bandwidth, even with today's fastest video cards. The KT600 Platinum is still lagging behind the Gigabyte KT600 board a bit.

..:: Unreal Tournament 2003 ::..

The last benchmark we will test our motherboards with is Unreal Tournament 2003 using the 2.1 release of the HardOCP benchmarking add-in program that can be used with the v2206 demo. I chose to benchmark our motherboards using the Direct3D engine with low quality tests at a 640x480 resolution. You can see once again that the scores for the KT600 Platinum are tad slower than the Gigabyte solution, although the KT600 Platinum scores a couple frames per second higher with the asbestos map.